Tech Tuesday for 10/16 Swimming Bullets and Mortal Coil

A bit of a somber note for this weeks Tech Tuesday, as a true giant in the history of technology has passed: Paul Allen, dead at 65.

Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, died Monday. He was an investor, entrepreneur and philanthropist who influenced many aspects of modern life — from technology and science to sports and music.

Allen was 65, his investment firm Vulcan said in a statement announcing his death. He died in Seattle from complications related to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma two weeks after Allen said he was being treated for the disease.

Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, like the less-common Hodgkin’s disease, is a cancer of the lymphatic system.

“My brother was a remarkable individual on every level,” Allen’s sister, Jody Allen, said in a statement on behalf of his family. “He was a much loved brother and uncle, and an exceptional friend.”

Allen founded Microsoft (MSFT) with Bill Gates in 1975, several years after the two met as fellow students at a private school in Seattle. Allen left the company in 1982 after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease.

“I am heartbroken by the passing of one of my oldest and dearest friends, Paul Allen,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates said in a statement Monday. “Paul was a true partner and dear friend. Personal computing would not have existed without him.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Allen’s contributions “indispensable.”

“As co-founder of Microsoft, in his own quiet and persistent way, he created magical products, experiences and institutions, and in doing so, he changed the world,” Nadella added.

Among his many other achievements, Paul Allen donated over $2 Billion to charitable causes over the years.

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A Navy Turbine Tech who learned to spin wrenches on old cars, Oscar has since been trained as an Engineer & Software Developer & now writes tools for other engineers. When not in his shop or at work, he can be found spending time with his family, gardening, hiking, kayaking, gaming, or whatever strikes his fancy & fits in the budget.

14 Responses

TT4: No surprise to anyone who has studied the human vision system. The brain makes up an embarrassing amount of what we see, and can be readily fooled.

TT11: With no disrespect to Paul Allen the person, I spent far too much of my technical career fighting with Microsoft’s horrid technology decisions, and a number of years watching them largely halt the development of video compression algorithms by buying up and suppressing anything that looked like it might be better than their own limited tech. No kind words or thoughts about Microsoft from me. I generally disagree with “giant of technology” other than in the sense that he got obscenely rich. His largest technical contribution appears to have been buying up QDOS so they could get the original IBM contract.Report

TT7: Larger ships, especially carriers, often have workshops on-board for fabricating things. I can very easily see ships, even smaller ships, buying one or two of these metal fab printers and using them to print parts, so that the only things the shop would need are the tooling to finish the part (deburring, smoothing, etc.). Loading an assortment of powdered alloys would probably take up a lot less space in the hold than all the various spares, and would make the logistics a bit easier.

On the other hand, the movement of the ship at sea might make printing a challenge.Report

I suspect real time dynamic positioning and vibration isolation are solved problems, somewhere (eg, the integrated circuit industry has been working on those for a long time). The two I’d be worried about are speed (will hours be available to fabricate the part?) and power. Besides lasers, most of the metal printing systems require a controlled temperature electric furnace for final treatment of the printed parts. Aren’t most of the current-generation big Navy ships turning out to be electricity limited?Report

At first, a parts printer would be limited to things that are for non-critical systems. You wouldn’t want to be printing a main drive shaft bearing, for instance. But maybe something for an AC unit would be fine. As the printers get faster, that would change.

As for power, IIRC that becomes an issue during combat, when all the weapons systems and radars are online. During normal cruising, there is power to spare. But perhaps @kolohe is more dialed into the state of things and can correct me if I am wrong.Report

It's funny how browsers I think are a thing (specifically Vivaldi and Brave) don't even register on this list. Goes to show my techie bubble.

Browsers used to have better names. Netscape was brilliant. What the heck is a Firefox? (It's "Firebird" with IP considerations is what it is.) Chrome? Edge? Edge? Come on.

It's amazing how quickly Chrome accomplished what Firefox never did. It just goes to show the power of corporate muscle. When Google announced they were creating a browser I thought it was kind of dumb. I was wrong.

People say Firefox is better than Chrome now but I just can't get into the groove of it. Chrome doesn't work right on one of my computers and I use Firefox on it. it's passable, but I wish Chrome worked on it.

With Internet Explorer being replaced by Edge and Edge being Chrome-based, that means may be looking at 3 of the top 5 and 85% of desktop browsing occurring through Chromium browsers. That's concerning.

The ship's presence, he speculated, might have been related to the testing of a nuclear-powered cruise missile.

Did Trump tweet anything about this, you ask?

The United States is learning much from the failed missile explosion in Russia. We have similar, though more advanced, technology. The Russian “Skyfall” explosion has people worried about the air around the facility, and far beyond. Not good!

As some of you know, I lost my father two weeks ago. My mother called me that Friday afternoon and said, in not such direct words, that “you better try to get up here if you can.”

I did, but I was too late. But in the aftermath of it, it was good to be there. My mother and I ate together for two weeks (my brother and his family are coming in later, such are the vagaries of scheduling bereavement leave in a government agency). We cooked some favorite things. My mom roasted a chicken and then laughed ruefully and said “I guess it’ll be harder to use a whole one up now” and the day after that, we made a favorite chicken enchilada recipe given us by a former minister of her church who had lived in the Southwest. And she baked a favorite cake of ours (my father was diabetic and we had to be careful about sweets in the house, and also baking was hard while he was so unwell). I think it helped, maybe?

There’s a German word, Kummerspeck, which literally means “Grief-bacon” and is used to refer to the weight you put on while grieving. I had scoffed at that before because the more minor griefs (eg., breakups) I had suffered made me NOT want to eat…..but I know I’ve put on a couple pounds in the last two weeks and will have to explain to my doctor when I go in for my checkup on Tuesday….

And people brought in food – lasagna, and bread, and other things.

And we went out to eat lunch a couple times; before my father’s health failed so much going out to restaurants was a favorite thing and my mom hadn’t been able to do it, really, for six months or more while he was needing her care.

When I spoke to her today after I got home, she noted that even though she had told the ‘church ladies’ who do bereavement lunches she didn’t want them to go to the trouble for the memorial service this fall (we have some people with some specific dietary concerns coming), someone did call her back and suggest a dessert-and-coffee reception before the service and I urged her to have them do that – I have fixed things many times for funeral lunches at my own church and it feels very much like it’s one kindness I can do for the family, and having a piece of cake or a few cookies may make small talk easier in a time when it’s going to be hard.

I admit I always rolled my eyes over the “how to relate to your weird dumb relative who isn’t like you” pieces, or, worse, the “you should refuse to spend time with them or try to harangue them into your viewpoint over the Thanksgiving table” pieces, because my family has a lot of….different…..people in it, and we’ve always managed. You talk about other stuff, that’s all. You talk about how a favorite team is doing or the funny things someone’s kids are doing or you share memories….

Jeffrey Epstein, the millionaire financier and accused sex trafficker, is dead by suicide, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

The officials told NBC News he was found at 7:30 a.m. ET at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York and that he hanged himself.

Epstein accuser claims she was ordered to have sex with prominent men

He was transported Saturday morning from the Metropolitan Correctional Center to a hospital in Lower Manhattan. Upon arrival, he was in cardiac arrest, people familiar with the matter say.

Epstein, 66, was being held on federal sex trafficking charges.

He was arrested July 6 in Teterboro, New Jersey, as he returned from Paris on a private jet.

He had pleaded not guilty and was denied bail.

The indictment on his case showed that he sought out minors, some as young as 14, from at least 2002 through 2005 and paying them hundreds of dollars in cash for sex at either his Manhattan townhouse or his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, federal prosecutors revealed last month.

Epstein was charged with one count of sex trafficking conspiracy and one count of sex trafficking. He faced up to 45 years in prison if found guilty.